The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (39 page)

The boys let the girls drop like leaflets from the height of their shoulders right by the flag. Then they huddled in a circle, as if the world were their soccer game, and whispered.

“You are going to write, big, with stones, ‘We Are Whores,’ or we’ll … we will torture you,” Yoav said to the girls on the ground after a few minutes. “We will not let you go home.”

Yael rose from the ground and sat on her bottom. She looked up at Yoav. His eyes were red. He’d been smoking weed. She could see that the snot in his nose was black, and she knew he had been too afraid to wash his face and be forced to look in the mirror since he got back. She could not believe
he used the word “torture.” It sounded cliché. Like he hadn’t bought the vowels for it.

“We are not writing nothing,” Yael said, low. “Nah, nah, nah. Come on.” The old Rihanna song flew from her mouth. She remembered when Rihanna had overdosed the year before. How she had cried about it while looking at her delayed flight glowing in red in that tiny Romanian airport. “I like it, like it,” she now sang on.

“Listen, girls,” Avishag said. She removed her hands from her eyes. She had been crying for a while; the dry wetness blended with the new.

“You shut up with your baby talk,” Yael said. She hadn’t yelled at Avishag since they were in high school. Maybe that was a problem, Yael thought, and then waited for Lea to talk.

“I am a professional writer and I won’t even write it in stones. Stones are so permanent. And I personally like ‘S&M,’ even on Facebook. I like it, like it,” Lea said. She did not sing the lyrics.

And so the boys did not know what to do. They shrugged at each other, pointed their guns and made the girls go to their caravan, the Negev guns storage container that was already locked. They made the girls crawl on all fours.

“W
HAT NOW
?” Avishag asked. Night was dropping and all the lights on the base went out, then back on, and again.

“Now we are not scared. There is no fear in the world,” Yael said. There was becoming much more of her with every word. “We have two bottles of sauvignon blanc and tons of
pizza crust and pasta left and a whole bottle of Diet Coke, from that time you accidentally bought diet. I brought it here.”

“You brought it here from the boys’ area?” Lea asked.

“I brought it here. I thought it might be wise.”

“So now we wait,” Lea said. “You thought it might be wise …” she said, and shook her head, smirking. It was almost as if she were surprised by something for the first time; at who Yael was, at who she herself was. In her voice Yael heard that Lea got it but was not sure she wanted to.

The girls sat on their mattresses and looked at the door. They did not move. They wanted to remember everything that had happened in the seconds before.

A
ND SO
it began.

The next morning Yoav entered alone and asked for a volunteer, and Yael volunteered by rising and walking and following him.

Avishag cried.

“OMG,” Lea said.

Yael talked through the whole march up to the flag, saying she’d do whatever if he promised not to touch the other two, then giving up hope when she was already naked and saying that she’d do anything and gladly, if he only spared Avishag. She mentioned the dead brother, but in the end it did no good.

The twelve boys and three girls were all active participants. Volunteering proved unproductive.

Nothing that they did was very productive. But they tried.
Yael tried talking. She would not shut up. She said she’d been hitchhiking all over Africa; that she probably had exotic diseases and that this was really not a wise move. Lea only spoke on the walk back, saying that this was all rather interesting, that she might write about it or tell her husband about it—they had been meaning to spice up their bedroom routine. She lectured the boys as she was clicking her bra shut, her hands under her uniform shirt. Even Avishag could not be shocked. She kept her eyes closed and whispered apologies for the war, sympathetic chin nods about how difficult it is to be a young man in today’s dating world.

The twelve boys found themselves inside a pickle.

T
HE GIRLS
were fine that first night. Even Avishag was thinking ahead. She spoke as the other two were looking at each other, as if hanging each other and Avishag on the line between their eyes.

“We’ll just have to do a lot of drugs. We’ll travel somewhere and do a lot of drugs and then move on,” Avishag said. She put her head on Yael’s shoulder and Yael did not push her away like she usually did. “Yael, did you do a lot of drugs in India? Which drugs are the most optimal drugs for moving on?” Avishag asked.

“The way you talk sometimes, I swear …” Lea said. “I’ve missed it.”

“Well, I wanted to do a lot of drugs, but it did not work out that way. I smoked pot once and felt like the window was pulling me toward it like a magnet. So I smoked pot in the
woods instead, and then I felt like I must find a window so it can pull me toward it like a magnet. Later one time I accidentally did X at a rave in Goa, and it made me so paranoid I decided that drugs were really not my thing,” Yael said.

“Paranoid! But X is the drug of love and trust!” Lea laughed.

“Maybe you should seek psychiatric counseling. There is something chemically wrong with you, perhaps,” Avishag laughed.

“It was the realest thing. A Persian boy with long lashes was running toward me on the road. He screamed his name, it started with a J, and although I did not speak Farsi I knew that it meant ‘the world.’ He smelled of moss, and it was because he was holding a brook trout in his hand that I thought came from the rivers of Babylon but knew didn’t come from there because brook trout don’t swim there, and besides, he was from Persia,” Yael said.

The heat and the thirst might have gotten to the girls, or at least to Yael. Yael would not let them drink the Coke for the first two days that they were trapped.

“You must have been tripping,” Avishag said. “It must have been another drug. X doesn’t trip you. I read about drugs in a pamphlet,” Avishag said.

“But the thing was, I was not the only one who could see the boy. Two of the people I was hanging out with could see him too. And they pointed at the boy and hid behind me because they were scared that the fish was poisonous and it would kill us all if it touched us. I was scared too, but I knew I shouldn’t be. The boy said he wanted his dad, but he wasn’t angry—it was more like he was worried about us partying like that.”

“That’s a very strange story,” Lea said.

“Stranger things happen,” Yael said.

And then a boy other than Yoav opened the door. He was eighteen.

B
Y THE
end of the second day, the boys had developed a routine. They knew each girl better than she knew herself. When Yael got back that afternoon, she got quieter, and this gave the other two the room to talk they had never had before.

Avishag told a story about a fifth grader in her Ethiopian scouts troop who painted nothing but severed toes. The severed toes would all have jobs, they would get married and go to the army, but they were all bloody toes. The school board was upset, and there was a meeting when all the parents decided that he must be sent away because he might cause harm to himself or others. Avishag spoke for him, but it did no good. Maybe that’s why a mom followed her afterward and found out about the psychiatrist.

Lea asked Avishag for another story, to see if another story could make her realize that the first story was really not worth remembering, if she should regret not having the energy to write it down.

Avishag said that because chickens need a lot of calcium to make eggs, her uncle told her to crush all the empty eggshells into a powder with a stone and mix it inside the chickens’ food. But one time she thought she’d try to see if the chickens could just eat the eggshells as crumbs. If they could peck at whole lettuce stems, she did not see why they needed the shells as powder. But what Avishag did not know is that when
a chicken eats something that looks like an egg it becomes an egg eater. That was the reason for the powder.

“So an egg eater eats other chickens’ eggs?” Lea asked.

“At first,” Avishag said. “At first she only eats other chickens’ eggs.”

B
Y THE
middle of the third day, they had run out of Coke. They still had some pizza crusts left. Lea had drunk most of the Coke—her body had forced her to—and she was so ashamed that Avishag kept going on and on about how it was she who had drunk most of it instead, and how sorry she was.

When the lights went off, Avishag stopped apologizing and cried. She was most afraid of the dark that was more than the dark she saw inside her eyes when she closed them.

Yael watched her own shadow; when she tilted her head, the shadow of her hair on the wall blended with the shadow of one of the guns so that it looked like the gun was trying to become her.

This was when Lea offered her solution. “You know. We do have ammunition. And automatic guns.”

“We cannot shoot them. Don’t even think it,” Yael said.

“We can threaten to, you little whore. You don’t control us,” Lea said.